


we haunt ourselves

by incognitajones



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: (sort of), Character Study, Extra Treat, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:53:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27292993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/pseuds/incognitajones
Summary: Davits Draven is a haunted man.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	we haunt ourselves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Guinevak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guinevak/gifts).



Davits Draven is a haunted man, but that’s nothing unusual. Everyone in the Rebellion is haunted—at least, anyone who survives more than a few months.

He’s seen enough of the Force to have a sincere respect for it. He’d be a fool not to. People who can move things with their minds shouldn’t be underestimated, even if he doesn’t grasp the limitations and mechanisms of that power. But the spiritual side of the Force, the way some speak of it as a metaphysical energy binding all life in the universe: that has never been a belief he subscribes to. Whatever happens to someone after death, it’s not a lingering existence as some kind of intangible entity.

Still, he sees people who are dead. Quite often. 

Of course they’re not actually there—if he thought they were, he’d have real problems. It’s his mind processing subconscious guilt, his memory filling in habitual sights. The human brain does that. So Andor watches him from the corner of a briefing room, where he always used to stand, limned in the blue backlight from holoscreens. In an ice cavern on Hoth, Saw Gerrera’s dull armour gleams with an instant of diamond-bright reflection. 

He’s only mildly concerned when he begins to see people whose names he doesn’t recall. A strange woman in the crowd at Mothma’s next briefing catches his eye; at first, he thinks it’s because she’s staring at him instead of Mon. As he’s sitting down that night to take off his boots, he remembers her: an X-wing leader in the second squadron shot down after he gave the order to send in air support for the attack on Agamar. He never knew her name, and he only knew her face because she was recorded sending in the last partial report from the field. 

He leans back in his creaking chair and rubs his eyes. He should have caught that memory hours ago. Vader’s balls, he’s loopy from exhaustion. He doesn’t sleep well, but it has nothing to do with ghosts. It’s stale air, tension headaches, too much caf and not enough full-spectrum light. 

The dead he carries with him are more like companions than spectres. To be honest, he thinks of them as friends. They’re not angry or vengeful, not as numerous as the ones he’ll never see. The faceless, nameless children who died under the Alliance blockade of the Sacorria system. All the local insurgents and planetary Rebels he used as tools to prop up Alliance operations with an actual chance of success. The indentured miners and shipyard workers atomized in sabotage missions he planned, because it would directly impact Imperial war efforts. 

Those are the ones who should haunt him—if there were such things as ghosts. If spiritual balance was a real concept, if karma existed… if that were the case, he’d have been killed long ago. So he’ll take the dead people watching him; they understand him, as they should, for they’re part of him. 

Or maybe he’s one of them already. Would Draven know, if he was dead? Or would he just go on droning his reports at endless Council meetings where no-one listened to him? It's an interesting philosophical question. He holds his hand out in front of him, blocking the glow of his datapad, and turns it over, staring at it with a frown before shaking his head. 

Dead or not, there’s more work to be done.


End file.
